Let’s start with a tangent: I hate the NFL’s coin toss at the beginning of overtime.
The biggest reason for that is because the league is giving random chance too big a role in deciding a game ... especially when that doesn’t have to be the case.
Obviously, the NFL has changed its overtime rules some in recent years, where now only a touchdown by the receiving team on its opening drive immediately ends the game.
The problem, though, is that teams have no way to prepare in regulation for the outcome of the coin toss. It takes an element of the game result away from both the players and coaches.
The frustrating part is this could be easily fixed with one simple change: Give the ball first in overtime to the home team.
Think about how the game would be affected before that. Are you an underdog on the road against the Kansas City Chiefs? It might be worth going for a two-point conversion and the win with the knowledge that giving Patrick Mahomes the ball to start OT isn’t a great option. The flip side is true as well; defenses up by seven facing Mahomes at Arrowhead would know it’s probably best to stop KC now ... as opposed to him tying it then getting the ball to start the extra period too.
It’s a long way of saying this: Whenever possible, leagues should make it clear to teams exactly where they stand.
And this is why, given the state of men’s college basketball in 2021, I’m ready to do away with the NCAA Tournament selection committee, which is a group that means well but is tasked with an impossible assignment each year.
The NCAA, in actuality, is making a mountain out of a molehill when selecting its teams. It has created Team Sheets and NET and Quadrants and endless “scrubbing” sessions when, in fact, all are completely unnecessary for the actual task of putting the most deserving at-large programs into the field each year.
There’s a simpler way to do this, and one that would have far-reaching benefits —perhaps the greatest of which being that it would allow all teams to know exactly where they stand in terms of securing an NCAA bid.
The statistic best used is called “Wins Above Bubble,” and it’s proven to be an effective way to compare every college basketball team’s résumé.
Here’s how it works. Using advanced statistics, Wins Above Bubble (WAB) tells us how often an average Bubble team would be expected to win each game, based on opponent and location.
A short example: For Kansas’ game Wednesday against Kansas State, a Bubble team would be expected to beat K-State 82% of the time.
WAB takes that number to credit or debit a team for every game it plays. So if KU loses, it will get negative-0.82 for performing that much worse than a Bubble team. If it wins, it gets 0.18 added to its total.
Add up every game of the season (KU’s current season total is 2.7, for instance), and you have a number that can be used to quickly compare how “deserving” each team is when it comes to potential placement in the NCAA Tournament.
This already isn’t far off from how it’s done already. Bart Torvik’s publicly available version of WAB closely lined up with the top of last weekend’s NCAA bracket reveal, and in fact, all top four seeds on that day were identical in both: Gonzaga, Baylor, Michigan and Ohio State.
Here’s the beauty of switching the selection to WAB, though: Every team will know, in the moment, where they are and what they potentially need to do to get into the field as an at-large.
Say, for instance, you are Belmont. As of Monday, you rank 41st in WAB, which would be in line for the first 11 seed.
All of a sudden, there’s clarity with your situation. Win your next four games — which would add a combined 0.11, 0.03, 0.21 and 0.25 to your WAB total — and you’re all but assured to be in regardless of what happens in the conference tournament. Slip up somewhere, and you can re-evaluate from there, knowing that a WAB ranking in the upper-40s or low-50s won’t be guaranteed to make it based on other conference tournament results.
So much of the guesswork is taken away. The final bracket would still need minor adjustments — you’d likely want to move teams up or down a spot to avoid conference teams meeting up early in the tourney — but those are already done as part of the current exercise anyway.
As much as it’s fun to speculate about how a win or loss might help or hurt a team, there’s no reason to think about things so abstractly. This tool would tell us definitively that a particular upset moved a team up two seed lines. Or that an unexpected loss had moved a school from the right side of the bubble to one of the first projected teams out.
The idea already has some backing. College basketball analyst Jordan Sperber has suggested it for years, while ESPN’s John Gasaway also recently wrote about the positives it would provide.
In case you’re wondering: WAB has Missouri 15th and KU 17th, putting them both in the 4-5 seed range and around where most bracket projections have them. Both could still move up or down, based on their future results.
How much so? We have no idea with the way the system currently stands.
But we’re smart enough to do this better.
It’s time to get rid of the committee, using Wins Above Bubble as a cheaper, better and more equitable way to bracket.
The actual teams — not an overworked panel — deserve to have the power here.
With full awareness that their own fate is completely up to them.
